UK elections!

The elections in the UK are hot these days, maybe even hotter than ever. There is a lot of buzz about the rise of the LibDems and the fall of Gordon Brown but it gets interesting from digital perspective when you zoom in to the approach of the three big parties. The campaign teams of all the different parties took a good look at the unprecedented digital (media) campaign from Obama that his team used during the US elections. They saw that such a effective digital media campaign could win you a many votes and that’s all that counts during elections. So the plans of the campaign teams were to put a lot of effort into the digital media world to attract and influence the voters. But strangely this doesn’t seem to work because none of the campaign teams knew how to do this in an original way.

The trick with digital media is, because of the loads of information, to trigger the digital user so that he or she gets interested in your message. The way the campaign teams are using the digital world now is by just sending traditional messages in a modern way. You can subscribe to a newsletter and you will get the same information you also read at the posters that you see every day, see the same movies as on the television but then on YouTube et cetera. This is not the way Obama did it in his campaign and this is not the way the parties should use it in future elections. That is why it is also interesting that a traditional medium took care of the biggest shifts in potential votes, the television. But there will have to be said that this was also a new approach since the UK never saw a live debate with the three big parties on television. So there was some kind of modernization after all.